Parrhesia in a Post-Fact Epoch, or ‘Poetry isn’t revolutionary but it is a way of knowing why it must come’

The twenty-first century is not characterized by the search for new-ness but by the proliferation of nostalgias…nostalgic nationalists and nostalgic cosmopolitans, nostalgic environmentalists and nostalgic metrophilliacs exchange pixel fire in the blogosphere.
—Svetlana Boym

When did we, our nation, slip into a post-fact epoch? Did it begin with the torture memos and the sophistry of the Bush administration’s seductive and scandalous indeterminate statements about the felicity of engaging Iraq in war in 2003? Remember Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense news briefing in February of 2002 concerning the lack of evidence that linked Iraq to weapons of mass destruction, yet somehow affirming that ‘yes, yes, we would go into Iraq anyway.’ In the briefing, Rumsfeld famously offered this soundbite that has reverberated around the world:

Reports that say something has happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

In this contortionist web of statements and follow-up statements that seek to elucidate the prior statements lack of clarity but somehow sinks us farther into a darkness of knowing-we-don’t-know, we might have seen a glimpse of what we now live in: a world in which frank, determined, or impassioned speech, its click-worthiness, matters more than its veracity, a world in which a presidential candidate and now president can constantly make untrue statements such that when their falsity is proven or displayed, what is held in contempt is not the lack of truth but the challenging of that untruth. We live in a word where signs do not signify or point but are merely broken props that can uphold clownish and bombastic pathos. But, maybe the post-fact era began earlier: in Jim Crow segregation—in the false assertion of ‘separate but equal.’ Maybe the post-fact era began in the consistently broken treaties between Native folks and the US government. Maybe, the United States has always been post-fact: beginning with the constitutional fraudulence of slavery, Dred Scott, and the mythos of this being a country where every man and woman had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Maybe, our post-fact lives began with the elided clause that haunts that most famous of guarantees of the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and happiness but only for white, male property owners, that other sort of aristocracy our founding fathers refused to unseat or dismantle. Maybe, like Ralph Ellison’s famous unnamed narrator, we’re “getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.” Maybe I am at the end and simultaneously at the beginning. So maybe this is where we begin—at the end, at what feels like the end of certain type of America, the end a certain type of democracy, a certain type of truth or at least an allegiance to it. Maybe, this has been the question of art, art in America, all along—how do we begin democracy, how do we truly extend democracy to all the animals? Maybe a poem will tell us. But how? Isn’t the POEM interested in lying, in artifice? Well, let’s begin with artifice.

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How does one encounter, enact, perform, poem-truth in a post-fact era, in an era where democracy seems to glide away from us even as we reach toward it, a Priam-esque shade avoiding our grasp in the afterlife? Has democracy always avoided our American reach? Have we entered the afterlife of our nation, paid the boatman, and now he ferries us off to wherever it is we are now—in an America that finds truth or fact secondary to affect and clownish, infelicitous speech, bombastic parrhesia? What is the artifice, metaphor, line length, linguistic register, syntactical deployment, rhetoric that can subvert the post-factual, the rhetoric (or un-rhetoric) of non-truth? But even in these questions, the creeping contradiction of fiction, of the un-factual enters in through my use of terms like “metaphor,” “artifice,” “perform,” and “poem,” which might, at first, seem anathema to the re-establishment of truth or fact. These terms conspire to trouble the establishment of fact, objectivity, Cartesian notions of truth. Thus, it might seem like a dubious act to think about a poem as antidote to the post-factual, though I hope to prove it is not. Poetry, it’s swank, flamboyant, and egregious allegiance to artifice, is exactly that type of frankness we need, a frankness delivered through imagining the invisible, through residing in the interrogative territory of speculation, of the fugitive, of the all-too-quickly-given-over-to-science-fiction-and-fantasy ‘what if’ that often ends in ‘and now we know how it could be, how it is.’ What I am pointing to is the constructed-ness of language as an apparatus to resist political tyranny, the lyric and its appending figurative apparatuses as technologies for imagining a future that critiques an oppressive and disingenuous past. What I also hope I’m simultaneously signaling is the need for more imagination in our frank speech, rather than less. I am arguing for a poetic parrhesia, something akin to an assertion that Adrienne Rich offers in the poem “Dreamwood”: “…that poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come.” The poem as siren, the poem as embodiment of an epistemological and ontological break, the poem as enactment of the invisible, the poem as leader of the new school, the poem as the future, the poem as an inhabiting the imagination, inhabiting the unknown and doing so frankly—this the ‘way of knowing.’

The poem must be an attempt to tip us into a place of truth or knowledge that we cannot turn away from, a terrain that once we have stepped on, we cannot feign ignorance or turn back from. The poem confirms that what we’ve been missing is here, in the so-called present. In other words, poetry, if it’s done well, inhabits and enacts the undeniable and inevitable future through making the future present. When enacted in the spirit of Rich’s assertion that “poetry isn’t revolution but a way of knowing why it must come,” poetry announces what of the past is untenable, unsustainable. The poem confirms for us ‘why the revolution must come,’ why it has already arrived and is only awaiting our acknowledgement. Thus, the poem in its inhabitation of the future, does so frankly, one might say parrhesiastically, in that it performs an unabashed, frank imagining and inhabiting that defies manners, institutions, institutional rationality, and reformist epistemologies of change; the poem defies and subverts the fragility of the powerful. The poem dares to think, perform, articulate a possibility, a contradiction—that in order for the imagined future to exist, it must risk its annihilation, its discontinuance.

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But, before we begin running off into the abstraction of the future, we might need to begin with the past, begin with a history of parrhesia and what I mean when I say a poetic parrhesia. Parrhesia, the term and concept, appears throughout Euripedes plays and in Greek texts in the fourth and fifth century BCE. However, it was not until more recently with the lectures of Michel Foucault at the University of California Berkeley in the fall of 1983 that the rhetorical figure and its philosophical import garnered more attention, discussion, and thought. Quite simply, parrhesia means frank speech. However, this is not a Cartesian frank speech, a truth or fact winnowed and deduced from a set of procedures, experiments, or proofs, a truth or fact that one was not in possession of prior to a testing for it. Rather, the parrhesia of Euripedes and subsequently Foucault is a frank speech, a truth derived from the body, substance, and life of the speaker. Foucault writes: “In parrhesia, the speaker emphasizes the fact that he is both the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciadem—that he himself [or herself] is the subject of the opinion to which he refers.” Thus the “speech activity” gains its efficacy through this conflation or flattening between speaker and thing spoken.

This relationship is intensified through danger. The speaker of parrhesia, the parrhesiastes, is in peril when speaking frankly because they are socially marginal to whom he or she addresses. Think: a messenger bringing bad news to a king, or a philosopher addressing a sovereign, or a citizen speaking frankly in front of the demos, the people. Think: a slave writing about his or her experience at his master’s hands, whip, and desire while still a fugitive, still on the run. Think: confronting a congressperson in a town hall about an immigration ban while being undocumented. In other words, “someone is said to use parrhesia and merits consideration as a parrhesiastes only if there is a risk or danger for him [or her] telling the truth.” Foucault explains further: “When you accept the parrhesiastic game in which your own life is exposed, you are taking up a specific relationship to yourself: you risk death to tell the truth instead of reposing in the security of a life where the truth goes unspoken.” Death, re-enslavement, loss of citizenship, and exile are the risks of frank speech. However, the speaker of parrhesia, the parrhesiastes, “prefers himself [or herself] as a truth-teller rather than as a living being who is false to himself.” Preferred is the liberating future that frank speech offers rather than the embodied and corporeal safety of the present. No self can be secure in a lie even if the body is momentarily protected.

The parrhesiastes risks criticism, risks speaking a possibility. In other words, the speaker of parrhesia risks the future. This risking of the future is a risking of the imagination but also the body. Again, we can hear the haunting of Rich’s quote in the background: “…poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come.” The parrhesiastic poem is one that risks imagining itself as sanctuary and ideological break, risks its censure and censoring, risks its speaker’s corporeal security because without that risk the body, the life must live on in a state of enclosure, one might even say, enslavement. Quite simply, the parrhesiastic poem risks subversion. But, this subversion is not without corporeal repercussions; however, this risking of the body is the duty of the citizen, according to Foucault (of which I also agree). While parrhesia might seem to be a type of personal politics made public, to borrow from the slogans of today, a living of one’s truth; parrhesia when done well, one might say felicitously, expands and gestures towards the demos, the people, the political. It, the parrhesiastic act, is an extending of democracy through welding or coalescing of the political body with the personal body, often a politically marginal body. This sublime act disturbs the well-kept and well-managed equilibrium of the State, the polis. The marginal body, speaking and imagining frankly, challenges the sovereign and sovereignty’s smooth and placid narrative of its supremacy and political sublimity. The performance of imagining exposes and subverts the notion that political imagining belongs firmly in the hands of the chosen, elect, elite, or aristocratic.

The intensity of this subversion, the subversion of the sublimity of artifice and political imagining, is akin to the poetic line and the pressure it puts upon the word, the pressure the lyric presses upon narrative. We can think of this pressure as a defamiliarizing of the familiar. The poetic line requires words to prove they mean what they say they mean; in other words, the poetic line estranges the word from itself, removes the veil or illusion of meaning through a forced gazing or investigation of the materiality of the word—breath, syntax, sound, line, metaphoricity (figuration), and the field of the page—which moves in concert with the material immateriality of listening. The word cannot be forgotten or backgrounded to the drawing of an image or the manufacturing of a narrative or plot; the word is itself image, narrative, and plot—at once itself, its history, philology, and future. In other words, the word in the poetic line is not mere material toward the path of bringing, for instance, a metal mailbox sitting in the middle of the road into focus. But the word on the poetic line is a way of thinking, singing, signing itself and the image drawn into existence. However, the word does not capture itself or the image completely but casts language toward it. The word in the poetic line corroborates its presence and simultaneous absence, its slippery and contingent life. Thus, poetry’s difficulty, or one of the many difficulties in poetry, is that it requires us to sit inside the contradiction of an illusion containing meaning. Through the artifice of the poetic line, poetry traffics in a different sort of sublimity than that of the political imaginary discussed earlier. Poetry’s sublimity asks that the reader constantly contend with the boundless iterations and citational history of the word while simultaneously thinking about the word performing its future and its present meaning, while drawing and manufacturing something called a poetic image or statement. Even as the word focuses, it forestalls complete or pornographic clarity and comprehension. One might say that the word on the poetic line has an asymptotic relationship to meaning—that it comes unbearably close to meaning while simultaneously exploiting and pronouncing its inability to land on the stable territory of it. Quite simply, it never arrives, but that never arriving is its success.

This subversion risks obscurity, opacity, but this welding of opacity, the asymptotic, with denotative meaning is exactly the parrhesiastic operation. Through the defying of category, the parrhesiastes, he or she that would speak frankly to the sovereign, steps out of order, remonstrates the purity of their position, their servility, and speaks as the Sovereign or with an authority akin to the Sovereign; the parrhesiastes deploys their body as epistemological and ontological break from the normative dynamic of manners and mannerliness; thus, becoming dangerous, illegible, obscure.     

Here again, to understand the type of subversion the parrhesiastes risks, we need to turn back to the Greek and Michel Foucault’s discussion of Electra, Orestes, and Clytemnestra. I will rehearse Foucault’s reading and simultaneously depart from it, offering up another reading that I don’t believe Foucault was interested in—that of the pedagogy of poetics. Clytemnestra has killed Agamemnon. Electra and Orestes are there to confront her. Before Electra confronts the queen, her superior, she asks several times if she might speak frankly, speak parrhesiastically. The queen, Clytemnestra, assures her that she can speak frankly, though Electra doesn’t quite believe her. When Electra is assured that her mother will not listen to her only to harm her later, Electra speaks. What makes this situation a parrhesiastic situation is that Electra is no longer under the protection of her father, Agamemnon; therefore, she is in the position of a servant or slave and speaks as such. But what makes this situation particularly instructive for us, modern readers, poets, and citizens under this post-fact, absolutist regime is what Electra does after she speaks frankly, confronting her mother about her involvement in her father’s, Agamemnon’s, death. She subverts the parrhesiastic contract by killing her mother. As Foucault states, “…the one who was granted the privilege of parrhesia is not harmed, but the one who granted the right of parrhesia is” (35-6). In other words, the inferior reverses the position through the sublime action of imagining an alternative possibility, an alternative future—an act of literal and figurative violence. What is exposed in Electra’s subversion of the parrhesiastic contract is the way in which parrhesia not only protects the inferior, she who addresses the Sovereign, but the Sovereign as well. Foucault concludes “the parrhesiastic contract becomes a subversive trap for Clytemnestra.”

Subversion as trap. Subversion as radical imagining. Participate in civility, in the customs of discourse, then undercut them. Maybe this gesture, this act is the aesthetic, the vocation and utterance, the imagination that we’ve been looking for, the pedagogical lesson on how to respond to a post-fact regime. But, what would this look like in a contemporary context? I believe we have seen some versions of this sort of subversion of the parrhesiastic game in the most recent weeks, months, and year—the women’s marches that sprung up all over the world in response to Donald Trump’s election, participants in a town hall meeting in Utah chanting to their Republican representative Jason Chaffetz ‘do your job’ and ‘last term.’ These moments of parrhesia, frank speech, are similar too Electra’s moment of both embodying parrhesia then subverting, in that they speak and perform. Quite simply, they demonstrate and through demonstration they begin to imagine and enact a future that no longer has unresponsive, lily-livered congressman at the helm. Their chanting isn’t the revolution but a way of knowing why it must come, to echo and haunt again with Adrienne Rich.

But what might this chanting look like in poetry, this frank speech that we are hearing and witnessing at town halls and protests echoing in the cavernous avenues and boulevards throughout our American cities and towns? I believe we are beginning to see this transformative, poetic parrhesia in the work of Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif. In Sharif’s first collection, LOOK, she continuously inhabits and interrogates the language of war, particularly the war on terror. Throughout her collection, she signifies upon the United States Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, hollowing out, subverting, reifying, re-defining, personalizing, troubling, and politicizing terms like DRONE, DESTRUCTION RADIUS, PINPOINT TARGET, EXECUTION PLANNING via the lyric. The politicizing of these terms is quite an important project because they can function with an ‘ere of apoliticality because they appear in something allegedly innocuous and reliable like a dictionary. However, this dictionary of military and associated terms is deployed diplomatically, politically, violently, and even torturously to do the bidding of both government and American business interests in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all over the world. Therefore, these terms are quite political, even as they rest in something allegedly as apolitical as a dictionary. And concomitantly (and this might seem like an aside), when is language not political, always-already carrying with it a nation’s mythos, identity, idea of (in)humanity, civility, and justice? Through the interrogation of what might seem like idle, perfunctory or procedural terms, she concomitantly implicates us, the American citizen, in her wrangling and grappling with the terror of these terms. These terms, which people the space of the dictionary, are metonyms, substitutions for us. Like the terms, we sit idly in the security of our homes, gathered in the safe dictionary of America, in the belief that we are not the ones droning, bombing, organizing EXECUTION PLANNING or measuring THE DESTRUCTION RADIUS of recent military operation in Iraq or Afghanistan. But, like these terms, we are not idle placeholders that merely describe an action; we are not mere apolitical metonym. We are the action itself. Our American citizenship is a DRONE, is a DESTRUCTION RADIUS, is a PINPOINT TARGET.

And because we drone and bomb and destroy, we must find a way of imagining and subverting ourselves, subverting our nostalgia for war and the language of war, the language our bodies have become accustom to. Sharif employs and achieves this subversion through gathering a bevy of voices, what I might call extending democracy to all the animals. However, in gathering the voices, peopling a poem like “Drone” with soldiers’ accounts, with the voices of victims of drone accounts, with her own personal biography, Sharif does not hierarchize the voices. Rather, they appear behind a colon, adorned only in their frankness. Sharif performs what the poet and philosopher Éduoard Glissant might call a poetics of relation. Without explicit markers that designate race, age, nationality, or rank, the voices accumulate into a drone or chorus. They blend to sound or sing a jagged song about war and the bodies upon bodies that lay at the bottom of it. Through the accumulation or droning, what Sharif calls “singing,” we gain both the particularity of the individual while having to wrestle with the sublimity of the collective. The parrhesiastic lay in the sublimity of this cohesion, in, as aforementioned, the collapsing or welding of the marginal body and its alien-ness to that of the civil body, that of the polis. For instance, “Drone,” opens with a persona that speaks in the first person, one that we might assume to be the poet’s, though that might not be necessarily the case:

: somewhere I did not learn mow down or mop up
: somewhere I wouldn’t hear your father must come with
me or I must fingerprint your grandmother can you
translate please
: the FBI has my cousin’s computer
: my father says say whatever you want over the phone
: my father says don’t let them scare you that’s what they want…

Then, the persona, the first-person voice shifts to what feels like witnesses of a drone attack recounting the aftermath, their experiences:

: it was my job to put a cross on each home with dead for
clearing
: it was my job to dig graves in the soccer field…
: from my son’s wedding mattress I know this mound’s
his room

Then, the poem shifts again to the voice of soldiers, particularly American soldiers:

: I dropped a knee and engaged the enemy
: I emptied my clip then finished the job
: I took two steps in and threw a grenade
: I took no more than two steps in before firing
: in Haditha we cleared homes Fallujah-style

Then, one more devastating shift:

: my father was reading the Koran when they shot him
through the chest
: they fired into the closet
: the kitchen
: the ninety year old
: the stove
: just where was I

Just as you think that you have located a voice, located a narrative, the poem shifts; the poem subverts your familiarity, your desire to get comfortable in voice, in the lyric. The resistance to this comfort is also a resistance to nostalgia and sentimentality which we might say are the presiding affective conditions of our current age. Sharif’s use of the plain-spoken, which we have seen more of, particularly if we think of the work of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, helps to destabilize and raze a facile emotional connection to the subject matter, to trauma, to the fungibility of the pained bodies in the text. Too often in political writing, writing that seeks to grapple with our American complicity in empire and empire-building, writing that would think about political and social horror, trauma, and the aestheticizing of it, the pained body in the text becomes a vessel for the reader to fill with their own affect and affective relationship to the described or rendered pain. Think: the many postings and re-postings of black death at the hand of the police recycled on Facebook statuses and pages, foregrounded by a comment that expresses the user’s dismay, chagrin, heartbreak over top the scene of death. Think: a letter from an abolitionist to his brother, a slave owner, trying to dissuade him from continuing his practice of slavery through the exchanging of his body for that of a slave, as in ‘imagine it was me or my children that you’re whipping.’ In both examples, what is foregrounded is the body and affective experience of the spectator or the reader rather than the actual body in pain. It is as if the body in pain is so opaquely human, so non-human, that the only way to understand their pain is to disappear their body, to annihilate it through analogy, in other words whiten it, re-nationalize the pain through a body swapping. Sharif resists this appeal to insincere affect through the gathering of many voices and the refusal to sentimentalize them, a refusal to capitulate to a narrative and, instead, embrace many through an ethnographic rendering of them.

Sharif’s gathering of voices and rendering victims alongside the victimizers produces a panoply effect that is reminiscent of Kerry James Marshall’s 2002, three-part photographic series, “Heirlooms and Accessories.” In “Heirlooms and Accessories,” Marshall, through erasure, revises a famous lynching photograph in which the lynched bodies hang from a tree while a crowd casually mills about the bodies, some pointing to the bodies, others smiling and laughing as if at a carnival or circus. As Marshall notes in a video produced by the Smart Museum in conversation with his art work, too often what is focused upon is the men’s bodies in the trees, but for Marshall, what is most brutal is the casualness of the spectators witnessing the lynching. Marshall continues, they, the crowd, are all “accessories to these murders,” hence the use of accessories in his titling. Because this brutality, the brutality of casualness, can be missed because we are used to focusing on the apparent, pornographic violence of the lynched bodies, Marshall decided to obscure the lynched bodies in the background and frame the women’s faces that peered into the camera at the precise moment the photographer takes the picture. Marshall frames their faces with broaches or pendants, mementos which are normally passed down from one generation to the next, much like racial violence, hence the use of the “heirlooms” in the titling of the piece. Also, as Marshall notes, his use of broaches as a framing mechanism is a critique and subversion of the heirloom tradition of lynching—the photographs of dead bodies turned into postcards, the cutting off of fingers, toes, and hair of lynching victims to be brought back home as memorabilia. Marshall interrupts and intercedes in this long citational chain of transmitting the dead, black body as the only manifestation, the only heirloom of lynching. This recasting offers another signature to the event, destroys the familiar aestheticizing and politicizing of lynching.

Like Marshall, Sharif performs a similar sort of obscuring and intercession in “Drone,” in that she does not allow the reader to rest in the pornography of American militarized violence or in the victims’ testimony concerning that violence. We are made to move and move and move, such that the poem at one point asks: “just where was I?” This inability to locate oneself in the poem is not only the success of the poem but the state of complicity many of us, Americans, find ourselves in as citizens of an empire. Where are we? Sometimes, we are victims, particularly black folks in this country in relationship to our militarized communities by way of the police force. And, at other times, we are the victimizer. Victim-and-victimizer is not a stable relationship, as Achille Mbembe notes in Critique of Black Reason. Mbembe describes these competing modernities astride one another in plantation life. Mbembe writes:

The blacks on the plantation were, furthermore, diverse. They were hunters of maroons and fugitives, executioners and executioners’ assistants, skilled slaves, informants, domestics, cooks, emancipated slaves who were still subjugated, concubines, field-workers, assigned to cutting cane, workers in factories, machine operators, masters’ companions, and occasionally soldiers. Their positions were far from stable. Circumstances could change, and one position could become another. Today’s victim could tomorrow become an executioner in the service of the master. It was not uncommon for a slave, once freed, to become a slave owner and hunter of fugitive slaves.

Though Mbembe is describing the unstable position of the slave in the sociological atmosphere of the plantation, the logics of this indeterminacy persist today, persist in the relationship of the marginal and non-marginal subject to the empire, to the State, to authority. Sharif occupies this zone of indeterminacy, this liminal space as a poet and, concomitantly, persuades us to enter it as well as a reader. Through the removal of punctuation in the poem, Sharif demonstrates for us that the grammars of victim and victimizer that we have normalized and made normative are now blurred, queered, obscured, and rendered opaque. One voice, one sentence will bleed into the next. Like Kerry James Marshall, Sharif seeks to raze the stable and brutal ground of the casual gaze, the casual look at violence. The spectator, the reader in the case of Sharif’s “Drone,” must become unlocatable, nomadic, must become relocated through complicity, through the act of reading. Sharif stuns us, the reader, away and out of sentimentality and nostalgia. Quite simply, she will not allow us anything emotionally, rhetorically, or aesthetically easy. We must grapple with the shifting of our rhizomatic and opaque relationship to language, aesthetics, witness, and empire.

Through a gathering of voices, of parrhesiastes, those in service of the empire, those victimized by the same empire, Sharif teaches and demonstrates for us the poetics of parrhesia, how to speak back to the empire, to a post-fact regime and nation. It is not in a singular voice but in a gathering of voices. However, this gathering is not without tension and conflict; it is not the uncontested territory or epistemology of tolerance and saccharine notions of democracy. Rather, in the gathering, in the proximity of one voice next to another, the reader resides in the muck of war and frank testimony concerning its horrors. Terms like “NSA” and “FBI,” apparatuses and agencies of the nation, sit next to more traditionally understood poetic language like “bone,” “singing,” and “wedding.” This coalition of traditional or received poetic language and the banality of US acronyms for federal agencies performs a double renouncement and simultaneously an embracing. First, it renounces the fixity of these terms, raises the curtain that might keep them separated in the mind of the reader, removes their lack of cohabitation in something like a poem and poetry. While this sort of coalition and defamiliarization process isn’t new—for instance, Amiri Baraka, Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez have all written work that confronts the FBI and surveillance in poetry—what is particularly productive in “Drone” is the deployment of it. Sharif writes: “I say Hello NSA when I place a call.” In this recounting of a speaker addressing the NSA while making a call to not-the-NSA, Sharif parrhesiastically loud-talks the surveillance state and the tradition. Loud-talking is an African-American signifying practice in which a speaker addresses an interlocutor while also intending to be overheard by another. However, the speaker shades or cast aspersions at the one overhearing, making them more and more uncomfortable because they’re being talked about directly but indirectly so. The goal of loud-talking is to make the one being shaded call themselves out in frustration, anger, or embarrassment. Another way of thinking about loud-talking is making a private critique public. In this performance of parrhesiastic loud-talking, Sharif subverts the secret of NSA surveillance through excess, the excess of direct acknowledgement. In other words, the speaker puts the NSA on notice, on blast, which renounces the blind complicity or overlooked complicity most of us dwell in as citizens in a nation that exists in a state of exception, a state in which portions of the constitution can be and has been disbanded at the wish of the elected official. This notice, this ‘putting the NSA on blast’ also wallows in the abjection of being surveilled while subverting it, thus resituating and exposing what is behind the screen. The voyeur is exposed, the secret looking (or in the case of the NSA, the listening) revealed and thus revises and potentially undermines the “information” the NSA is gathering. There is a simultaneous looking, a simultaneous listening, which robs the voyeuristic NSA of its anonymity, of its power to gather information. All of the information divulged is done willingly and with knowledge that a conversation is being surveilled, thus subverting the efficacy of the surveillance. We might think of this loud-talking, this undermining as a type of ecstasy or an ecstatic utterance as well, as embodiment or inhabitation of freedom.

This moment as a mock or indirect apostrophe, addressing the reader directly in the lyric or poem (in this case the NSA), also calls into question the very notion of what a poem can contain or what a poem is. The semantic and rhetorical gesturing renounces, interrogates, and through the interrogation (i.e. the writing of a poem) embraces and expands what it is to write a poem, or quite simply, what a poem is. The speaker’s nod to the NSA (and concomitantly Sharif’s nod to the NSA) is a rupture, an obliteration of form and even decorum similar to the rabble of all these voices speaking at once and in chorus. Though an opaque multiplicity, an opaque droning, Sharif’s poem destroys the notion of a singular speaker of the lyric, annotating the collectivity of the song, the poem, thus remonstrating and talking back or sidewise to the lyric tradition (we might even say queering the lyric tradition), a tradition that has colonized and sequestered “speaking” to that of individuals. One might argue that Eliot performed a similar sort of amassing of “voices” in “The Waste Land.” And, I would argue no, no, not quite. Sharif’s gathering and renouncing does not corroborate a singular, broken consciousness of modernity (that still seems quite whole), but rather Sharif implicitly argues that a lyric, a song, a drone is a simultaneous or collective utterance or enactment—a we, but not the we of “we, the people,” which is not a democracy or a democratic extension of voice but yawp of the elite and landed gentry masquerading as collective sound of a country (an infant sitting on your lap and letting them pretend they’re driving the car when it is actually parked in the driveway). The ‘we’ that drones in Sharif’s “Drone” is more closely aligned to Muriel Rukeyser’s documentary poetry project, The Book of the Dead, a book of poetry that chronicles “the suffering of [coal] miners carelessly exposed to deadly silica dust.” However, Sharif’s “Drone” and LOOK depart from Rukeyser’s chronicling in that the obscuring of voice, the de-subjectifcation of the other. In this process, we, the reader, are not allowed to rest in affect or empathy, which dislodges the reader from allowing the poem and book to be a vessel for their ‘feelings,’ a fungible commodity that prioritizes their emotional relationship to the material, thereby turning the subject of the meditation into an extension of the reader’s affect and pleasure. Quite simply, Sharif does not allow us, the reader, to escape culpability through the easy and unaccountable residence of our feeling. Also, unlike Rukeyser, Sharif places victim next to victimizer, which troubles the reader’s affective relationship to the collective. This collective singing is not with its trouble and troubling. Nothing smooth, nothing easy, nothing without its blood.

What is resisted is a ‘proliferation of nostalgias,’ to call back to Svetlana Boym. What is resisted is the empire—me and you.